John D'Agata Quotes & Sayings

You move your life across the country and make a commitment to a place, and to a genre, and then you realize that neither the place nor the genre might be what you thought they were going to be, or that the world you thought you were going to find in school doesn't actually exist. — John D'Agata

You're often looking at writing from writers who, for the most part, are working in forms that traditionally fit into other genres. But sometimes, in the midst of their better-known stuff, there's this wayward thing, and because it's wayward it isn't considered representative of their work, so it falls through the cracks. — John D'Agata

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated. — John D'Agata

I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open. — John D'Agata

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well. — John D'Agata

When you're a young writer and you look at people praising a big hefty anthology that has uncovered a long lost genre, it can be disorienting to look inside it and think, "But what it's uncovered still isn't me. What does this mean? Do I not belong in this genre, or is there more of the genre yet to find?" — John D'Agata

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out. — John D'Agata

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out. — John D'Agata

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre. — John D'Agata

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer. — John D'Agata

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go. — John D'Agata

When I'm teaching, I'm not really doing my job if the student who's always comfortable doing wacko stuff all over the page keeps getting gold stars from me for doing wacko stuff all over the page. A riskier assignment for that student, who might be used to hiding behind a lot of formal armor, would be to try to do something straightforward, traditionally, in which they are much more directly laid bare for the reader. — John D'Agata

If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair. — John D'Agata

Yet there are some critics in the nonfiction world who still look at some of today's stranger interpretations of the essay and say "You don't belong here. That's not how we do things." I think that's problematic. — John D'Agata

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example. — John D'Agata

Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work. — John D'Agata

The essay community should have hundreds of anthologies from hundreds of different perspectives that are constantly introducing us to new writers, new work, and new visions for our genre. The whole spirit of these anthologies is that there should never be a last word in how essays are interpreted or what they can be. — John D'Agata

Back in the day, a lot of our instructors in nonfiction were actually fiction scholars. So they would bring in stories as models for the essay. And in some ways that's a good idea, because we can all learn from other genres. But I think it also made me realize that I literally didn't have an essay model, and that if I wanted one I would have to find it. — John D'Agata

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. — John D'Agata

Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction. — John D'Agata

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about. — John D'Agata

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or - worse yet - leaving the blanks blank? — John D'Agata

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes. — John D'Agata

I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling. — John D'Agata

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school. — John D'Agata

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist. — John D'Agata

I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky. — John D'Agata

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. — John D'Agata

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s. — John D'Agata

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted. — John D'Agata

While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears. — John D'Agata

For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction." — John D'Agata

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change. — John D'Agata

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them. — John D'Agata

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see. — John D'Agata

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day. — John D'Agata

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is. — John D'Agata

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library. — John D'Agata

I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect. — John D'Agata

People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live. — John D'Agata

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it. — John D'Agata

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter. — John D'Agata

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing. — John D'Agata